context changes everything

Context is the invisible thread running through every single episode of this season. And I think it might be one of the most important factors in self-awareness that almost nobody talks about directly.

In this episode I finally give it its own space.

I get into the difference between connotation and denotation, and what it actually means that two people can hear the exact same word and walk away with completely different experiences of it. I talk about the identical twins thought experiment, paralinguistic features and why text strips context in ways that make misunderstanding almost inevitable, and a concept called semantic satiation, what happens when you repeat something so many times it starts to lose its meaning, and why that works in more directions than people usually realise.

I also talk about the words from school. Fat. Ugly. Weird. Boring. Why they aren't inherently anything. And what actually made them catastrophic.

And I look back across the season and show how almost every episode has actually been about context all along, just from a different angle.

This one ends on a question I've been sitting with for a while. What have you been carrying as a conclusion that might actually just be a context?